Gunmen ambushed and killed five Malaysian policemen as fears mounted that armed intruders from the southern Philippines had slipped into at least three coastal districts on Borneo Island, officials said yesterday.
Two of the attackers were also fatally shot on Saturday night, escalating tensions in eastern Sabah State, where Malaysia’s biggest security crisis in recent years began after about 200 members of a Philippine Muslim royal clan occupied a village last month to claim the territory as their own.
Security forces clashed with the clan members in the coastal area of Lahad Datu on Friday, leaving 12 Filipinos and two Malaysian police commandos dead.
Photo: EPA
The remaining clan members have refused to budge, while concerns have grown that other groups from the Philippines’ restive southern provinces might enter Sabah, which shares a long and porous sea border with the Philippines that is difficult to patrol.
A police team was attacked late on Saturday while inspecting a settlement in Semporna town, more than 150km from Lahad Datu, national police chief Ismail Omar said.
Authorities were searching the area for more of the assailants.
Police are also investigating sightings of armed foreigners in military-style clothing in a third Sabah seaside district nearby, Ismail said.
It was not clear whether the groups in the three areas had links to each other.
The Filipinos who landed in Lahad Datu on Feb. 9 say ownership documents from the late 1800s prove the territory is theirs.
They have rejected repeated calls from both the Malaysian and Philippine governments to leave Sabah, a short boat ride from the southern Philippines.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said on Saturday that the government would offer “no compromise — they surrender or face the consequences if they refuse.”
Police dropped leaflets by helicopter over the occupied village on Saturday telling the Filipinos to give up, while the navy bolstered patrols in waters between Malaysia and the Philippines.
Three of the intruders tried to escape late on Saturday and were caught, Ismail said, without elaborating.
Sabah’s chief minister Musa Aman said the federal government has agreed to increase the size of the police and army force in Sabah.
The standoff has raised the Sabah territorial issue, a thorn in Philippine-Malaysian relations for decades, to a national security concern for both countries.
The crisis erupted during a delicate time in peace talks brokered by Malaysia between Manila and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the main Muslim rebel group in the southern Philippines.
Several Malaysians have voiced worries about whether tens of thousands of Philippine migrants living in Sabah, many undocumented workers, might sympathize with the Filipino group and cause unrest if they are angry with the government’s reaction to the crisis.
The Lahad Datu group is led by a brother of Sultan Jamalul Kiram III of the southern Philippine province of Sulu.
In Manila, Jamalul Kiram III told reporters that he was worried the violence in Sabah might spread because many Filipinos, especially followers of his sultanate in the southern Philippines, are upset by the killing of their compatriots in Lahad Datu.
His daughter, Jacel, who is a sultanate princess, called on Filipinos to stay calm, but stressed the sultanate would never back down from its struggle to reclaim Sabah.
“This concerns honor above life,” she told reporters. “We will not retreat just like that, because we’re fighting for something, and our struggle is our right and the truth.”
China’s military news agency yesterday warned that Japanese militarism is infiltrating society through series such as Pokemon and Detective Conan, after recent controversies involving events at sensitive sites. In recent days, anime conventions throughout China have reportedly banned participants from dressing as characters from Pokemon or Detective Conan and prohibited sales of related products. China Military Online yesterday posted an article titled “Their schemes — beware the infiltration of Japanese militarism in culture and sports.” The article referenced recent controversies around the popular anime series Pokemon, Detective Conan and My Hero Academia, saying that “the evil influence of Japanese militarism lives on in
DIPLOMATIC THAW: The Canadian prime minister’s China visit and improved Beijing-Ottawa ties raised lawyer Zhang Dongshuo’s hopes for a positive outcome in the retrial China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing. Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo (張東碩), yesterday confirmed China’s Supreme People’s Court struck down the sentence. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟). That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory. In January
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
RSS